Diverging Entrepreneurial Paths of Survivalist Truckers: Migrants’ Ongoing Agency in US Trucking

Abstract

This article explores the formation of migrant agency by scrutinizing the decision-making processes of owner-operator truckers. Drawing on qualitative data collected among male migrants from Turkey in the US, the main finding is that migrant truckers, by making various decisions at the turning points of their career, choose one of three trucking segments and decide the number of trucks that they own. To understand the differentiated ways agency is formed, the article utilizes forms-of-capital analysis, which reveals how truckers mobilize combinations of social, economic and cultural forms of capital. The study conceptually contributes to the scholarship on migrant entrepreneurship by developing the concept of ongoing agency that combines the temporal aspects of migrant agency with the forms-of-capital analysis. This concept is used to understand how migrant truckers reconfigure their agency as they move between segments and ownership statutes over time.